Thursday Links: The Art World’s New Favourite Collector

The mysterious buyer of that Basquiat top lot at Tuesday’s Christie’s contemporary has been revealed. Yusaku Maezawa is the forty year old Tokyo-based billionaire founder of online shopping mall Zozotown, and reportedly went on a shopping spree snapping up works by Nauman, Prince, Calder and Koons. But everyone’s really feeling him: dealer Barbara Bertozzi Castelli praises him as “someone with passion and an eye.” According to Maezawa, he bought the Basquiat because it was first shown in Tokyo back in 1985 and was “an art historical moment” for Japan. ARTINFO’s Judd Tully calls Maezawa “the real deal”. Emoji hearts overload! [BLOUIN ARTINFO]

Speaking of sales, Sotheby’s contemporary auction results from last night saw 95% of the lots sold with sales totalling $42.2 million. This is sure to be a boost, especially after the poor performance of Monday’s Impressionist and Modern sale. Oh, and Maezawa — the collector of the moment, it seems — was there, and bought Adrian Ghenie’s “Self-Portrait as Vincent van Gogh” (2012) for $2.6 million and Wool’s “Untitled” (1990) for $13.9 million. [Baer Faxt, The Art Newspaper]

Big news in the online art market world: leading start-ups Auctionata and Paddle8 are merging. The news comes on the heels of a Hiscox’s report last month noting both companies double their sales in 2015, bringing in a total of $3.27 billion. The report also predicted that the market will consolidate, and that eventually one large company will be the platform that everyone will use to buy or sell art online. [ARTnews]

Why was a Melbourne artist mysteriously deported from the United States? Hamishi Farah was supposed to be in town for a solo show of his work at NADA last week. But when he attempted to board his connecting flight from LAX with an electronic waiver, he was given a “SSSS” (secondary security screening selection) boarding pass. This is apparently a list that the airline then sends to Homeland Security. He was then questioned and searched, had his passport confiscated, couldn’t make any calls, and spent 12 hours in a cell. He was then sent back on a flight to Australia with no stamp on his Australian passport or explanation of what happened. Baffling. The black artist, represented by Sydney’s Minerva Gallery, believes he was racially profiled. [The Age]

Siddhartha Mitter is a big fan of the Brooklyn Museum’s African masquerade show, in particular, for its forgoing of the typical museological vitrine display of masks. [Village Voice]

Vetements, a Parisian design collective, has gotten a lot of notice in the fashion world for producing “contrarian mallgoth style collections” beloved by Kanye West and Rihanna. Think health goth soccer socks somehow transformed as a kitten heel ankle boot, or knock-off DHL uniforms. Berlin-based artist and stylist Ella Previn, however, believes the conditions of the collective’s success — in particular, its chic silhouettes that echo the street style of skinheads, rioters and police — is the “bastard attire of a broken generation”. [Spike Art Magazine]

Oh, Canadians. We really know how to take care of our own: an Edmonton strip club is offering free lap dances to fire evacuees from Fort McMurray. The city is located right at the heart of Alberta’s oil sands region, so this offer is presumably targeting its oil patch workers. [Toronto Star]